Most gems contain pure Ruby code; they should simply leave the default value in place. Some gems contain C (or other) code to be compiled into a Ruby “extension”. The should leave the default value in place unless their code will only compile on a certain type of system. Some gems con...

NoSecurity – Well, no security at all. Signed packages are treated like unsigned packages. LowSecurity – Pretty much no security. If a package is signed then RubyGems will make sure the signature matches the signing certificate, and that the signing certificate hasn’t expired, but tha...

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Because RubyGems provides support for version comparisons, we want to pick a policy that works well with the RubyGems comparisons and gives the end user what they expect. We call such a policy “rational”. Also, if we call non-working policies “irrational”, then we apply a little bit o...

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1.1 Really Quick Start Question: I’ve installed RubyGems and I want to install Rails (for example). How do I do that? Answer: gem install rails 1.2 What is a Gem? A gem is a packaged Ruby application or library. It has a name (e.g. rake ) and a version (e.g. 0.4.16 ). Gems are managed...

5.1 Basic Versions The concept of a version is central to the RubyGems packaging scheme. Every gem package is assigned a version string consisting of digits and periods (e.g. “1.3.122 ”). The gem command line program and the gem Ruby command both take version constraint arguments. The...